There has been some press about political spam recently. People are receiving email from the White House that they have not opted into. At a recent press conference a reporter challenged the press secretary to defend the practice. Chris Wheeler over at Bronto blog points out that CAN SPAM doesn’t apply as this is political mail, and CAN SPAM only covers commercial email. He also notes that...
A few weeks ago, ReturnPath published a study showing that 20% of permission based email was blocked. I previously discussed the definition of permission based email and that not all the mail described as permission based is actually sent with the permission of the recipient. However, I only consider this a small fraction of the mail RP is measuring, somewhere in the 3 – 5% range. What...
Last week, the state of Maine passed a law prohibiting marketing using personal information to minors without verifiable consent from a parent or guardian. From what I understand, this law started out as a prohibition on using health information for marketing and expanded to any personal information. The law defines personal information as: 4. Personal information. “Personal...
Eric Goldman reviews the appeals court decision in Gordon vs. Virtumundo. This case is exceedingly interesting and important because it destroys the arguments of anti-spam plaintiffs trying to manufacture technical violations of CAN-SPAM for their profit. Not only does the opinion send an unmistakable message to the lower courts to toss these plaintiffs out on their keister, but it sends the...
A couple weeks ago, I linked to a comment from a marketer mentioning that email addresses should be able to be traded around like snail mail addresses. I suggested this might be a good topic to hear from a lot of different people on. Mickey posted List Rental is…. In that post he looked at how email is different from direct mail and how the attitudes are different as well. The folks at Bronto got...
The 9th circuit court of appeals issued their ruling in Gordon v. Virtumundo today. The ruling was heavily in favor of Virtumundo. I have not had time to read the ruling, but both Venkat and Mickey have posts on the case and the ruling. This is another solid blow against anti-spammers suing spammers under state laws and CAN SPAM. The problem is that many of the cases are brought by people, and...
A few weeks ago someone commented on a previous post of mine about list purchasing saying that at some point senders should be able to trade and sell email lists like they trade and sell direct mail lists. As much as marketers may not like this, email is never going to be the free for all that direct mail is and they’re never going to have the ability to trade email addresses the way they do...
One of the challenges anyone doing business on the internet faces is how to provide contact information so that potential customers can reach you in a form that spammers can’t easily abuse. Contact forms are the classic method, but they can (and are) abused by spammers. We decided to try something different. About 2 months ago, we started using rotating contact addresses. Every day a new...
A couple nifty new delivery tools were published over the weekend. Mickey published Bounce P.I. where senders can paste in an error message or bounce and it will tell you what filter generated it. If the rejection is unrecognized, it will flag the message internally and it will be researched to see if the filter can be identified. Steve has a new tool at the DKIMCore site. The key generating tool...
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